Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A podcast about dinosaurs
Justin Jackson (00:03)
Alright, let's see if this I'll let you guys know when we're actually
Jordan (00:07)
Yep, yep.
Justin Jackson (00:08)
Actually up on our RTMP.
Corey Haines (00:13)
Are we live on Twitter too or is it just YouTube? Okay.
Justin Jackson (00:16)
Just YouTube. Maybe when I have my return to Twitter, then I told you I got it. I've got it on my calendar, guys. Didn't you guys hear about this? About the Christian Genko thing? Cause he he he he bet me $1,234 that I would be back on I would post on Twitter again within 24 months. So I put it in my calendar and I'm gonna come back the day after.
Jordan (00:17)
Yeah, ch ch ch Justin Come on.
Corey Haines (00:21)
Come on, man, come back. Dude, it's a good time.
Brian (00:21)
Get back on Twitter, dude.
Corey Haines (00:27)
Gosh.
Brian (00:31)
Yeah, I remember.
Jordan (00:31)
What?
You have a return date? my god, fantastic. B best joke I saw today was someone put a s someone put a screenshot of their calendar and they've created a calendar event for the like live execution. I was like, that's so dark. That's why you gotta live on X. That's why you gotta live on X. You can't miss that. You can't miss that. Come on.
Corey Haines (00:44)
my gosh.
Justin Jackson (00:54)
⁓ my god.
Corey Haines (00:55)
Jeez Dear Lord.
Brian (00:57)
⁓ man.
Justin Jackson (00:58)
⁓ my this is why I wanna get off X.
Brian (01:01)
Cheers.
Corey Haines (01:03)
Yeah, this is what you're missing out on, Justin. Come on. Don't you want to come back?
Justin Jackson (01:05)
Hey everybody, nice to see you in the chat. We got Jason Resnick, we got Seth, we got Ryan Hefner. Where have you been, Ryan? Zach Gill, Seth Chaffee? Is it Chaffee? Is that your last name? Chaffee? Am I saying that right? ⁓ folks, we got a good show. We got Corey Haynes here in in the flesh. ⁓
Jordan (01:27)
Yeah, I'm oversharing in the chat about my my lunch mistakes.
Justin Jackson (01:34)
It's a good thing we create an edited version of this one. and then we got silent wolf. Is that ⁓ silent wolf. And I got Chaffee right. Perfect. Perfect. Nice. Dave Jones. Dave, there's another Dave Jones in the open podcast ecosystem that makes all of the he's big part of podcasting two point ⁓ So I always think it's
Jordan (01:34)
I did.
Brian (01:48)
That's gotta be his real name.
Justin Jackson (02:01)
You guys are the same, but you're a different Dave Jones.
Jordan (02:03)
Yeah, yeah, we gotta catch up.
Justin Jackson (02:06)
all right, I'm gonna do the intro. ⁓ I will introduce Corey Haynes. what's what d what's the official company, Corey?
Corey Haines (02:16)
You can say conversion factory. That's that's the main gig still. Yeah.
Justin Jackson (02:20)
Conversion factory. Let's see if I can remember that. All right. Welcome to the panel where founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, co-founder of transistor.fm.
Brian (02:34)
Brian Castle, I'm founder of Builder Methods.
Jordan (02:37)
And I'm Jordan Gall, founder at Heyrosy.com, and we have a special guest today.
Justin Jackson (02:42)
Corey Haynes from Conversion Factory. Welcome to the show, man.
Brian (02:44)
Cory.
Corey Haines (02:46)
Yeah, thanks for having me. I feel like a midget amongst giants. Like you guys are my heroes. And so it's like weird to be here. I'm like, what do I when do I chime in to say something? Like I'm just only l used to listening to you guys.
Justin Jackson (02:50)
Yeah.
Jordan (02:52)
Come on.
Brian (02:53)
no way,
Justin Jackson (02:56)
dude. I I don't know if you've ever sat ⁓ stood next to Jordan Gall and myself, but I I'm pretty sure you are a giant amongst midgets.
Jordan (02:59)
I mean I think
Yeah.
Brian (03:06)
You
Jordan (03:07)
Yeah yeah. Look, part of the reason we do this podcast not in person is so Justin and I can e avoid that fact entirely. I remember when we first met, we were like, ⁓ an a an another five foot sevener. There we go.
Justin Jackson (03:16)
Yes. It's it it's perfect. It's perfect. I love
Brian (03:19)
It's true. Justin and Jordan's personalities are a lot bigger than they are in person.
Justin Jackson (03:24)
⁓ that is my favorite thing about meeting someone imperfect. I'm going, I thought you would be taller in real life. I'm like, yeah, that's exactly. That's why I live on the internet.
Corey Haines (03:27)
I see. Yep.
Jordan (03:33)
Yep. Yes sir. But Corey, you have you have a very strong Twitter game. So I think your your status you you do a lot of stuff. That that's what kinda gets me. And your post from Conversion Factory always has me like, Should I reach out for a redesign? Is it is it time for us to do a redesign? Yep, yep. No, it's good stuff.
Corey Haines (03:33)
Right.
Brian (03:33)
I'm probably a bit shorter too, I don't know.
Justin Jackson (03:37)
Yeah.
Mm.
Corey Haines (03:48)
Mm, mm, mm.
Brian (03:50)
Yeah, I that's what I wanted to I want to wrangle Cory in here this week, because I think Cory, you're known as like the marketing guy. You've been that everyone has like a name plus like thing that everybody knows them for. feel like marketing is the word for Cory. And, know, we know Conversion Factory, sort of like your agency service, but you're doing a lot of other stuff. You've got marketing skills, which which have blown up. You've got a ton of SaaS products. ⁓
Corey Haines (04:02)
Yeah.
Brian (04:17)
a whole portfolio of those. I wanted to get you on here because we're always kind of hacking around on what's working, what's not working, how is SaaS changing. We can get your thoughts on all that, but also just you as a builder. You're like a marketer turned builder. There are so many places we can go. ⁓ So I think this will be fun.
Justin Jackson (04:33)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well let's start ⁓ let's start with this Brennan Dunn tweet right here. Remember back when every business marketing bro wanted a technical co-founder? I mean, yeah, yeah, I can identify with this. ⁓ Jordan, what's your reaction to this?
Corey Haines (04:48)
Guilty.
Jordan (04:57)
I thought it was genuinely a spicy take. Because it's a little rude, but has enough truth in it that, you know, it's tough to argue with. I I do remember back to this because without a technical co-founder, it was just all talk. You could have as many ideas as you wanted, but you needed to figure out a way for one of these people who contained the secrets to the magic.
Justin Jackson (04:59)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (05:25)
To believe enough in what you wanted to do to join you to make it a reality. And it was ⁓ it felt like a very risky, dangerous first it was very difficult to find the right person. And then and then you you understood from the beginning that they held an enormous amount of leverage. And I remember this was like ⁓ you know, one of the foundational conversations in SaaS world, in microconfworld, in anything.
Justin Jackson (05:54)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (05:55)
And it's amazing how it's changed in okay in a lot of ways over the last two years. In in in other ways, it in other ways it hasn't changed. I'm continuously reminded at how unbelievably valuable and talented my CTO and co-founder is. So so I I'm gaining skills, but but I still respect like the the real thing. but it's interesting to see these hybrids.
Justin Jackson (06:01)
Yeah. In the last six months.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (06:21)
Corey, what what was your journey? Like how technical were you beforehand? What got you into AI? I l I feel like you have you have one of like the most popular like GitHub repositories for marketing skills. Like, okay, explain that. How how did that happen?
Justin Jackson (06:21)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (06:35)
just learned not to do my own horn, but I just learned because it blew my mind that marketing skills is the 481st most popular repo on GitHub in the world of all time. And I was like, what? Yeah, right. Right. No, yeah, it's it's crazy. Well, it's funny too, because when I saw that tweet as a formerly non-technical person, turned semi-technical enough. ⁓ my thought too was like, I wonder how much of
Justin Jackson (06:45)
Wow.
Jordan (06:45)
Yeah, it's like it's basically just DHH in and yourself. Yeah, it's g Yeah.
Corey Haines (07:04)
Being a non technical person, having to go and pitch and get a technical person on board to build the thing was a forcing function for like validation of your idea. In other words, like, you know, the technical guy, the CTO's gonna be like, okay, dude, cool story, but like, do you have customers? Do you have revenue? Like, is this really a good idea? I'm gonna spend the next, you know, ten years of my life potentially building this thing. Like, you have to be really, really sure.
Justin Jackson (07:15)
Mm.
Corey Haines (07:32)
And now there's all these non-technical dudes like me who are like just building anything and everything. And the where is the validation? ⁓ or like what does the validation look like now? I I've tried to avoid that because I think that I've listened to you guys for way too long. And and you've been around the block a couple of times, right? But I mean my my story was I was a marketer and then I got sick of one working for companies, so I started a conversion factory.
Brian (07:38)
You
Corey Haines (08:00)
And then two got sick of trying to recruit people to build my ideas. So I did a coding boot camp in August of 2023, like a month after I started conversion factory. And this was a boot camp, but it was me going to Ryan Kolp's house in the middle of nowhere, Georgia, with nine other strangers. And he literally just like taught us how to code in his garage by like screen sharing and being like, do this now and do that. And we like build apps together. ⁓ and it was there that I discovered Cursor.
Brian (08:17)
yeah.
Justin Jackson (08:18)
I remember this.
Corey Haines (08:30)
And then it like, there's Tragic PT in your IDE, like now you can use AI to code. So I built like my first two apps from scratch, like by myself without AI. And then ever since then I've just been like button mashing Clyde and be like, please make it better.
Brian (08:45)
Man, it's like 2023 to be that if that's the year that you went from just being a marketer to starting to learn how to code. mean, that is such an unbelievable year to be doing that. Because I mean, I started long ago, like 20 years ago, like, as a front end developer designer.
And then it wasn't until 2017 that I got serious about learning Ruby on Rails and learning how to, for that same exact reason, like trying to gain that magic, that superpower to be able to take product ideas and be able to ship them end to end. But I was doing the boot camps then with no AI. And if you're doing that at the outset of AI in 2023, ⁓ man, like that is like such a magic moment to get into it.
Corey Haines (09:13)
I remember that.
Yeah.
Jordan (09:30)
Yeah, good timing.
Corey Haines (09:31)
Yeah, well it's it was like I learned all the things the hard way fur but I only had to do it once. And then every time after that I did it the easy way, right? But like there's definitely something important about that. To your point, Jordan, about like appreciating your CTO. for two of my SaaS products, I still have technical co-founders for them because I'm like, this is above my pay grade. Like I could probably figure this out, but like I'm gonna make a lot of mistakes. It's probably not gonna be as good. Like
Jordan (09:53)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (10:01)
Should I even be spending my time on that? I don't know. I'm a I think I'm I'm a much better marketer than I am and builder, you know what I mean? So it's still not like the the the silver bullet.
Justin Jackson (10:08)
And and what
Yeah. I I think people are gonna wanna know what are the SaaS products you've got going right now?
Corey Haines (10:17)
Sure. Okay. So the main one is TrueList. It's an email validation tool that salespeople and marketers and product people use to make sure that an email exists. It's very simple. It's like super infrastructure, like DevOps heavy. ⁓ so basically impossible to vibe code, which is great. ⁓ and I got looped into that ⁓ when Grant, my co-founder, he had just made a couple of like lifetime sales through posting on Reddit. And
Justin Jackson (10:45)
Mm.
Corey Haines (10:45)
Now we're paying ourselves a salary. So we're not like public about the numbers, but it's it's going well. And so that's the main one. There's also Magister, which is this AI marketing agent that I'm building with my buddy Elliot, which is kind of like Swipewell 2.0 for anyone who knows that story as well. this one is ⁓ essentially born out of marketing skills because I made marketing skills, and then everyone was like,
Justin Jackson (10:51)
Nice.
Corey Haines (11:12)
Clawed code, what are you talking about? Okay, like maybe there's maybe there's some kind of SaaS that can encapsulate all the integrations and like team collaboration that you need to do to do marketing with AI. And so that's Magister, and we're growing every month, and we're kind of like still in this open beta stage right now because it's a very, very, very technical product. and then I have a host of other random projects. I have
Three SAS that I built for my church, so that I'm now I'm getting more churches as customers. I've built some Mac OS apps. I've I have a bunch of like random content sites. I've built some mobile apps. I've I've pretty much built everything. And they all have traffic and they all have users and signups. Not all of them have customers. like the the first like eight that I mentioned have customers. The other like twenty do not have customers.
Justin Jackson (11:43)
Yeah.
Mm.
Mm.
Jordan (12:00)
Okay.
Justin Jackson (12:07)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (12:07)
Okay. But you you get in traffic. Yeah, hell yeah.
Brian (12:08)
still a hell of a track record right there. Even if just the top eight and then of course the top two or three are actually pretty significant. ⁓
Justin Jackson (12:18)
question though is, should you be focusing, Corey? Would would it be better if you just focused on one project? Which of those projects do you think is
Corey Haines (12:24)
You guys tell me. That's why I came on this show for
Brian (12:28)
No. No.
Jordan (12:28)
man. We're yeah, we're we are the the opposite of like overly confident declarative, you know like business infl no no way. Th there is n yeah, we're we're no way. Th there's no right way to do it. But yeah.
Justin Jackson (12:36)
But maybe you could walk us through a little bit of like how you're thinking about that though. Because before we started recording, you were saying, you know, maybe it is too many, too much stuff. Is it too much stuff? Are you thinking like you need to double down on something? what what are you what's kind of going through your mind right now?
Corey Haines (12:38)
You don't you don't give prescriptive advice here? I thought okay, never mind.
Brian (12:44)
Hey, you do you, man, and I think it's awesome.
Corey Haines (13:01)
Yeah, well, this is a question that I've been asking myself for years. Like I was asking myself if I was doing too much by having a newsletter and a course and a job. You know what I mean? Like there's kind of like always this like, ⁓ should I just be like focusing on this right now? Or life would be easier, life would be simpler, my time would be a lot easier to manage if I just had this one thing or maybe two things to focus on. here's my here's why I've landed on this and why I continue to go down this path is that
Justin Jackson (13:11)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Corey Haines (13:32)
For one, I think that as a marketer, actually, my time and efforts can go further across multiple things as it d or compared to as if I was like a builder or a CTO who is in multiple things, like owning the code and owning the uptime of multiple projects. I think that's harder. th there's a lot of marketing where you're kind of like, okay, I'm gonna do this thing and I'm gonna wait. I'm gonna do this other thing while this thing kind of like proves out.
Justin Jackson (13:52)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (14:02)
And so I've always like, all right, let me make an investment, let me plant a seed, let me do something, and then like circle back to this, and then I just accumulate keep accumulating more and more things. But my like overall strategy right now is I have this kind of personal brand. I've done a good job of Twitter, LinkedIn, my newsletter, setting all this up so I can start making videos and publishing to YouTube. And if I can use this as a way.
Not the way, but a way to drive trafficking customers to at least a couple of my projects, businesses, whatever you want call them. Then it's kind of like a rising tide lifts all boats. And so I can have like my personal media business, and then I can have my services business, conversion factory, which is cash flowing and a nice job. And then I can have my products, which are more like my moonshots, my experimental software, my
Justin Jackson (14:43)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (15:00)
scratching my own itch, my maybe I just build this and sell it you know, for for pennies, or maybe I build it and sell it for millions later on, I don't know. But they're maybe all interconnected in some way and can work harmoniously. That's the idea.
Justin Jackson (15:10)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. I mean, w this might be a good time to bring in d what Jordan wanted to talk about, which is Josh Pigford launching Josh Pigford finally focused on something.
Brian (15:26)
I want to let's get into that. But before we do, just want to I want to react to Corey's Corey's portfolio for a minute here because I think personally, I think it's fantastic the way that you're going about this ⁓ for you. Like I think my my thing on this show is always like, I'm not going to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't do because each one of us has ⁓ not only different like strengths and weaknesses and different assets and everything, but different personal goals, right?
Justin Jackson (15:31)
Sure.
Jordan (15:31)
Yes, please.
Justin Jackson (15:56)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (15:56)
⁓ You're obviously a person here who's in a position with a ton of optionality and a wide skill set from marketing to building that it does make sense. what I think is most impressive about what you're doing, Corey, is that like, what I think does make the focus thing hard or the portfolio thing hard is if somebody's portfolio is completely dependent on their personal brand.
Right? Like, if you're a personal brand and you are trying to market 10 plus products solely through your personal brand channels, that is too unfocused and it's not going to go very far. And you can always grab your first 20 customers, but beyond that, it's just not going to sustain. You're spreading too thin. But what you have going on is like, you have a couple of businesses that are clearly coming from your personal brand.
but then the majority of your portfolio is actually pretty quiet. There's a lot of stuff in there that most people following on Twitter don't really know about. And you're doing SEO, you're doing these little planting the seeds, they're growing over time. And that is to me a true portfolio that you can water these plants and give them some love. And they can be low, medium sized revenue and stack up.
to a portfolio of assets that, like you said, I just think it's, to me that is a valid way forward. Obviously it's not for everyone and there are plenty of people who see the world completely differently and that's what this is all about. It's totally cool, you know? So, just wanted to throw that out there.
Corey Haines (17:33)
Yeah. Well th there's another part to this too, which is I have to say the word because I think we have we've avoided saying the word now for seventeen minutes and forty seconds, but AI changes things too. because Yeah, yeah. All right, that's it. Yeah, thanks for having me. No, but there is something to that where like I I I've been setting up Grop Grokbot this week.
Justin Jackson (17:42)
Yeah.
Brian (17:47)
Well, thanks, Corey. Thanks for thanks for coming on the show.
Jordan (17:48)
Ha ha ha
Yeah, yeah.
Corey Haines (18:01)
And I've been testing a bunch of them. You know, I have magisters like just for marketing stuff, but I was like, hmm, maybe I can get Grockbot to manage help me with like personal life stuff, like scheduling an email and calendar and like all this admin stuff, finances. But maybe I can also get it to have these little hooks and loops for ⁓ bug fixes for maintaining an open source project like marketing skills, where like I just closed a hundred and thirty PRs this week.
Justin Jackson (18:31)
yeah.
Corey Haines (18:31)
you know what I mean? Like that gives me scale.
Brian (18:34)
I'm using Grokbot in that way. I love it. I just did a video on it. It's coming out next week. I have a team of Grokbots. Now it's up and running finally. It took me a while to get it tuned. But they're doing marketing experiments on a daily and weekly basis. every one of these products in my portfolio, I don't have nearly as many as you're running, Corey, but now I can actually work on whatever my next product is.
while my other ones have growth experiments running. Like bots are pitching ideas. I just get an email. I approve it. They go do the things. They post the stuff. They optimize the site. They post content. ⁓ I approve it. Then it just loops. Then they track metrics. They give me a metrics report. They give me learnings. I approve it. And that's how a company can actually scale as a bootstrapper, like company of one.
Corey Haines (19:23)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (19:31)
with actual bots, installing jobs into these bots to run on a loop. I think it's awesome.
Justin Jackson (19:37)
Can I can I push back on this a little bit? Because I I I'm also the skeptical part of me is still like 120 PRs closed. Like the volume sounds impressive, but I'm getting increasingly interested in that small percentage of the stuff that we do that actually matters, that actually moves the needle. And so I'm wondering how much of this is just like it's just like, you know, I'm like ripping out a lot of.
Automation right now. We have all these Google actions running on a bunch of our repos. I'm ripping that stuff out. It's like useless kind of cruft, more lighthouse tests and an href test that runs and automatic screenshot thing that finds Google search results and screenshots it. And I'm like, no, I I just want to care enough as a human, as a marketer, that I'm gonna go and do a lot of this stuff manually and I'm going to.
Do a lot more things manually than I than and and maybe even reverse some of the automation. So what's ⁓ Corey, how are you thinking about that? Like what's the what's the balance here? Is this stuff really moving the needle? Is it what is the stuff that's moving the needle? Like what's actually working in practice?
Corey Haines (20:58)
Yeah, I I mean I think that is feasible and can work if you're focused on probably one thing. ⁓ if you're like me and you have ⁓ like literally, I don't know, thirty or forty repos that I'm working out of, like there's just no way I can even afford to do anything manually these days. I'll I'll give you an example, which is that maybe last week there was this new library that came out for like end-to-end testing.
Justin Jackson (21:04)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Corey Haines (21:25)
And it's this great way to like okay, one of the things that agents struggle with when they're building is they build the code, they, you know, it passes all the the checks and compiles successfully and you know, Vercel says the it's good to to publish, and then you go and look at it and like the UI is garbage and some things don't actually work and you're like, What the hell? So the end to end testing actually makes it click through and act like a user and do things in a way that ⁓ helps to
replicate the way that a a real person would use it. And so I tried it on one of my apps and I was like, this is fantastic. So I then I had Cloud go through all thirty other repos and implement this library. I think that day I had like five hundred commits or something. Like it was just an insane amount of code that was going on. That's a level of automation that I think is really valuable. And also no way that I'm gonna do that manually myself.
Justin Jackson (22:03)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (22:25)
across thirty of those repos. Of course that's like a super extreme example, but I don't know, the part of like I'm always looking for like what's the next thing and what's another thing that I can do. I'm kinda always pushing like, all right, what's next, what's next, what's next. So the idea of like, I can't do what's next because I'm intentionally constraining myself would make me feel like I'm in a straitjacket.
Justin Jackson (22:25)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Brian (22:52)
And I think this always gets back to like each person, your personal operating system. Like, I don't think it's ever a good idea to just go automate things because somebody else says you should automate something or somebody on YouTube shows an automation that you should just plug in and, like even like, like Cory, like, like your, your, marketing skills are fantastic. But like, one of the things that I did was like, I, you I built, I was setting up these, these growth
like rock bots, I had them analyze a lot of your marketing skills and pick and choose some of the best ideas and some of the best instructions and best strategies so that I can craft my own and I can make a of those decisions and craft my own version of the things that I'm running. But like also Justin, I think a key part of it is like, yes, you could throw a lot of stuff at any kind of AI agent and have it do a lot of stuff.
Corey Haines (23:31)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Jackson (23:48)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (23:49)
but it's only as productive as you can personally manage it and act on it and make real decisions on it. I spent a lot of time, ⁓ I had them starting up, these marketing agents, and at first they were just sending me these huge emails with all these marketing ideas and reports and a list of 50 things for me to review and approve. was like, this is not useful. It's way too much. I can't make any decisions on this. It's.
Justin Jackson (24:06)
Mm, mm.
Brian (24:17)
It just creates a new bottleneck that's just not gonna work. So I spent like a week or two to recraft how the agents are sending me stuff in more bite-sized, you know, like different formats so that it's in a format that I can actually read and make decisions on and unblock things and then like keep things moving forward. it's just like, it's an iteration thing for each personal operating system, you know?
Justin Jackson (24:19)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Okay, okay. Jordan Jordan, I see you wanted to get in. Let's get let's get your take here.
Jordan (24:50)
Okay, cool. And then we'll we'll go to the topic that you tried to bring up a few minutes ago. I what what what I'm hearing as as Corey's describing his setup, it sounds to me like a like a rational way to manage risk. And and what I mean by that is if if I did 120 commits, you know, or PRs this week, that means it's moving.
Justin Jackson (24:53)
Ha ha ha ha.
Jordan (25:17)
Pretty close to saying I send 120 emails. It's like, all right, well, you know, it took some effort, but like, you know, it's nothing special. And and the more moves in that direction, the more it makes sense to diversify not the number of projects that you're doing, but the different types of projects. So a service-based business with a
Justin Jackson (25:23)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (25:39)
with a customer base and a reputation and a process that creates cash flow that can't just be disrupted because some model releases a new thing. But then at the same time, taking the high risk, high reward bets around products and automation and expanding that outward, and then making sure that the personal brand remains at the center of it so that you have more options in the future.
So I I o I almost see it as like this like risk management portfolio ⁓ approach. ⁓ and then, you know, a a lot of effort and talent mixed in there is like that that that is what produces the unusual outcome of like a whole bunch of things being successful.
Justin Jackson (26:11)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (26:22)
And that's exactly the thing that comes back to the focus question for me, like even ⁓ sort of what Brennan was talking about. like, yeah, like a lot of these things are bets, right? ⁓ So does a quote unquote bet like a call it like a small startup SaaS idea? Does that deserve 100 % of our hours and energy for multiple months at a time if like
Like that seems like too much risk put into that one bucket when you can actually allocate that. That's the advance with AI now is that we can, it used to be like, yeah, you do have to decide I'm gonna spend a year to build version one, the MVP, and get it in the hands of customers and do all the things.
But now with AI, you actually can build and ship version one in two weeks and start to validate and start to do some marketing experiments and plant those seeds that then take months. And then you can balance out the risk a little bit.
Justin Jackson (27:24)
Yeah. I'm gonna put I'm gonna still push back on this. And and by the way, I I am the the make a hundred things in a year guy, the mega maker guy. So I I come to this with some experience and some bona fides. ⁓ here's here's the here's the the thing, the Pigford thing. So this is this is one reason I want to talk about this because and not to be critical with Josh, I love Josh, I think Josh is great.
Corey Haines (27:25)
Yeah.
Jordan (27:45)
Okay.
Justin Jackson (27:52)
I would say looking at his career since bare metrics, the one thing some people have said is he he makes a lot of things, he puts out a lot of bets that haven't really gone anywhere. And sometimes it's like, man, you should just focus on one thing. Put all of the wood behind one arrow and just focus on one thing. Now he's doing this one thing, which is really service as a software.
Is this is this the new term, services of software? And he I mean, this this ARR thing is a little bit come on, Josh. One week in sales done and state you can't he that's not ARR yet. That you're one week in. It's a
Jordan (28:24)
Yes.
Brian (28:30)
Yeah.
Jordan (28:33)
Come on what?
Look, the the new definition of ARR is MRR times twelve. Period. That is the industry standard and even that people stretch. But yeah.
Justin Jackson (28:50)
Just just say how much revenue you've earned. Just say I I've earned some revenue. I it's good. You know, you don't have to call it ARR.
Brian (28:57)
He-
Jordan (28:57)
Sure, put put up a measurement that nobody else uses, just to be extra humble because that's what the internet's all about. Like, no way. No way.
Justin Jackson (29:03)
Yeah.
Brian (29:05)
I mean, I think it's awesome what Josh has launched here. ⁓ It is like, it's a productized service. It's a service as a software. It's software powered service, whatever you wanna call it. ⁓ And I love the way that he packaged it. He just tweeted out just totally like, here's what you get for 2000.
you're going to do all the things for SEO, plug in the bots. The way that he put it together is great. Obviously, he's using the asset that he has, which is his Twitter audience. And the way that you play the game on Twitter is to post big dollar numbers, ARR, and that's going to help the thing spread. look, yeah, of course, Josh is somebody who's done 1,000 different projects.
Justin Jackson (29:29)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brian (29:53)
I'm not someone who would say that all those projects are quote unquote failures and he shouldn't have been doing them. I think he absolutely should have been doing them because he because that's he's he's a designer. He's a creator. He's a builder. He wanted to build those things. So I think in his view and my observation of him is like those are successes because that's what he wanted to do with his time and he was able to do that stuff with his time. And this one happened to hit like of course when you do that many projects eventually you're going to hit a nerve and clearly he did with this. I just think it's awesome what he's doing.
Justin Jackson (30:22)
Yeah, I I still think there's so th it's focus. It's like if we go back to this Tim Sulow quote.
Jordan (30:29)
It's been it's been a week. It's not it's the opposite of focus. I if if he sticks with it for a year and gets it to five million ARR, then it's focus. This is this is a
Justin Jackson (30:34)
ha
Yeah, then it's focus. Mm-hmm.
Brian (30:40)
I don't expect him to do that and frankly for Josh I don't think he should because that's not his thing.
Jordan (30:44)
Yeah, yes, I I I c completely agree. Yeah.
Justin Jackson (30:46)
No, I disagree. I ⁓ Corey, what are you what are your thoughts over there?
Corey Haines (30:51)
Okay. Well
So originally when we were like when there was a whole indie hacker thing and it was like, now with AI, we can have instead of having you know, or sorry, would you rather have ten startups that each make one thousand dollars MRR, or would you have one startup that makes ten thousand dollars MRR? And then people are going back and forth, I don't know. Like I kinda think that it's neither. And this reminds me of of Josh and I think a lot of other people that build as well where like you said, if your goal is to build a portfolio where
Justin Jackson (31:15)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (31:24)
Maybe one gets to a hundred K ⁓ R R, one gets to ten, a couple get to one, a few get to zero. But then that's sustainable and that's going up. Like, cool, that's awesome. Where where I take issue and where I think that the issue with that strategy is when you get one thing to fifty K MRR and then it starts to go down, and they get the next thing to ten K R and then it starts to go down and you're never really making forward progress. They're
There's a really extreme example of this. I don't know if you guys are in this circle of of Twitter, but Justin, I know you're not. But there's this guy named Mark Liu, and ⁓ he's this big personality, huge following. I mean, he originally started making good money with his Shipfast React framework. And at one point it was doing like a hundred and twenty K per month, like it was making good money, but it was like this, and then it was like this. But he's like he keeps doing this.
Justin Jackson (32:00)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (32:09)
Ship fast.
Justin Jackson (32:10)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (32:22)
It'll have one that goes up, one that goes down, one goes up, one that goes down. If you notice, he has a couple, like there's Data Fast, his analytics SaaS that does like 30k MRR. Awesome. But to me, like again, if if it starts to go down, I think I've done something wrong. Like the numbers should kind of always be going up, or at least plateau. Why would I keep making more things that go up and then go down?
Justin Jackson (32:33)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (32:49)
I I don't wanna play that game personally. I think that's kind of like the losing strategy here. If you keep making things and they're kind of always going up, even if they're going up like a little bit or they're not going up by very much, to me that's still like a win. Like cool, you're still building something that is ever increasing in value. I don't like the the treadmill type of startup thing.
Justin Jackson (33:04)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I mean I guess the good I guess to Brian's point, it it really does depend. Like there's some people that can do this. Some people can, you know, levels is another one example. Some people can build multiple things and and do well with them. I think if I am gonna give some prescriptive advice, I think most people could benefit from focus. There's something about wanting it more wanting one thing and
And saying this is a good bet. If we're talking about making bets, like I don't know a lot about playing poker, but I do know if you keep making bad bets, you run out of money. The whole idea about poker is knowing when to make a good bet. And ⁓ I mean I l every time I play poker, especially with my boys, they want me to, you know, put cash in or whatever. I just keep buying in because I just keep betting and I lose all my money and my boys are happy to take it all from me. So yes.
Corey Haines (34:07)
Can I extend this metaphor? Because I I think you're right. Like the the idea here is, hey, when you have a good ⁓ hand of cards in front of you, you have a full house, and you just know that you have the best hand at the table, and it's just such a like obvious win. Like you're trying to go all in. You're trying to completely shove. But what if you can do that on multiple tables at the same time?
Jordan (34:09)
Yes.
Justin Jackson (34:21)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
⁓
Jordan (34:33)
In in theory, yes. What what when I heard you mention you know the nature of some products where they climb up and they start to go down, what it made me think of as these individual moments in a product or company's like revenue life. And there are plateaus. And when you hit a plateau, if you're not paying attention to it and you focus on five other things.
Brian (34:33)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (34:59)
it's very unlikely that you'll do the thing that's required to get it out of that plateau. You know, w when you're focused on one thing, you hit a plateau, it's like, you know, it's like this desperate energy and focus of, okay, clearly what got us here is not gonna get us to the next phase. What do we need to do? Do we need to change our pricing, change our onboarding, change our ICP, change our positioning? So that that part of the focus I I I think I would feel worried about missing out on.
Corey Haines (35:28)
Yeah. Yeah.
Justin Jackson (35:29)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (35:29)
I I think the hardest thing in all of this is gauging actual potential. The the only framework that I still like around potential is Noah Kagan's, where where he described working at Facebook as like totally skewing his understanding of what a hit product was.
Justin Jackson (35:34)
Yeah.
Mm.
Corey Haines (35:48)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (35:49)
And so he would he would work on something for two, three months and maybe would get to ten KMRR and he'd be like, This is not how it feels when it's a hit. ⁓ it doesn't matter where it got to, this is not this is not the thing that is on fire and just flies. And and you know, h his explanation for why it appears that everything he does is a hit is only because he just cycles through things until it feels like it's flying.
Justin Jackson (35:56)
Yeah.
Okay, but I gotta I got a b good example. This is a little spicy. Noah don't hate me for this, but he Noah tw tweets this. Confused why people s pay so much for kit and beehive. By the way, what he's really saying is I'm confused why so many people use kit and beehive. ⁓ they're fine products, but they're expensive. $139 a month. It would only be $39 a month on Senfox. Now, Senfox has been around for a long time now. This is Noah Kagan's product, one of them.
Jordan (36:41)
Sh sh shout out to Nathan Barry. Just the f the first comment being like, I I I got an answer for you. Respect. Respect. Hell yeah.
Justin Jackson (36:44)
Yeah, Nathan Nathan Bear is right.
Corey Haines (36:45)
Yeah.
Justin Jackson (36:48)
Yeah, and right here, love you, man. ⁓ the but ⁓ you know, it part of me looks at this and goes, Noah, you're not good at product and you've started too many things. Your focus, if you were focused a hundred percent on Senfox and you didn't have the app sumo money train going, and you weren't so ⁓ div you know, you didn't have all these projects and you were trying to build all these things, just focus on Senfox, then see if you'll be a winner. But
Brian (36:49)
You
Justin Jackson (37:16)
This product's been out for years now, and I don't know anybody that uses it. So why is that? I think it's focus. I think it's I mean, focus and maybe lack of product sense or whatever, but there's a reason that Sendfox is losing.
Jordan (37:31)
I guess. Isn't this just a positioning play? It's just like here are the enemies, they're so expensive, they're so bad, we're here for you. I don't know
Brian (37:33)
To move...
Justin Jackson (37:39)
point is that they're losing. The point is that if you look at that market, do you guys know anybody that uses Senfox?
Jordan (37:45)
That doesn't mean they're losing. If they're making a bunch of money, they're winning. Maybe if they're not making as much money, they're still winning.
Brian (37:48)
Yeah.
Justin Jackson (37:49)
I don't I don't think they're making very much. For for somebody like Noah Kagan, it should be a massive out of the park hit.
Jordan (37:55)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Corey Haines (37:57)
Yeah, yep.
Brian (37:57)
Yeah, but well, I don't know that everything that he ever does has to be that but the ⁓ to get back to ⁓ Pigford for a second. ⁓ Again, I'm a big fan of what he's doing and his whole approach but to throw a little bit of like maybe some cold water on on this ⁓ on first index that this SEO service that he that he launched. mean, Corey, you might have some experience of this with with the agency side like I mean, I've done these productized service. I actually what he what
Josh is launching it as like somewhat similar to what audience ops was. It was like we will just deliver X number of articles for you for $2,000 a month and we will help you grow your SEO, right? ⁓ I mean, this is literally, okay, so here are the hard things about businesses like that, right? And these are not things.
Justin Jackson (38:32)
Yeah.
Brian, this is the new age of productized services. You're back, man. You're back.
Jordan (38:45)
Yep.
Brian (38:52)
reasons to rule it out. Like I'm still open to doing similar types of services, especially now with AI. Great. Those are all huge advantages compared to when I start back when I started audience ops back in like 2015. ⁓ The things that I would predict that something like that for Josh, like he'll run into these things eventually are number one, like you were just saying, like it is
Justin Jackson (38:58)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (39:19)
built off of it seems to be built off of his personal audience. So like he's going to have to find other marketing channels to keep new customers coming in all the time. ⁓ Because the Twitter game on that is just going to run out at some point. Like that's why you're seeing the big spike right now. If he can sustain it with other marketing channels and sales and stuff like that, that that's how that works. But he's going to need that because churn is going to be a real thing. This is a marketing service.
Jordan (39:26)
Mm.
Justin Jackson (39:47)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (39:47)
And what I learned about trying to sell a marketing service specifically is there is a lot of churn and for two very different reasons. One is like, this thing is not working, so we're going to allocate this budget somewhere else. And the other one is like, this thing is working, so we're going to take it in-house. ⁓ so a lot of times, more people churned off of audience apps because it was actually successful. They ended up hiring their own writers. ⁓
Justin Jackson (40:06)
Mm.
Brian (40:17)
You know, and so for...
Justin Jackson (40:18)
What's your take on that, Corey? Do you think 'cause you're you're in the marketing game?
Corey Haines (40:20)
it it's definitely tough. Yeah. Brian is spot on and I've learned I knew a lot of that going into it because of Brian, because of audience ops. ⁓ there's definitely some things working against you. There's a lot of when I see that, I I look at it and I'm like, oof, that looks like a lot of bad clients, like a lot of like headache clients, to be honest. ⁓
Justin Jackson (40:41)
Mm.
Brian (40:42)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's that's the other thing is like the client side of it. ⁓ I love what he put in his initial tweet, like, here's what you get list of things that we're going to do. And you're going to communicate with us through Slack. And that's it. No calls. Great. Like I look at that. like, my God, that's the dream. Here's the reality. There is going to be some percentage of people who are willing to open their credit card and pay $2,000 without ever speaking to you. Most of the world.
Corey Haines (40:57)
Yeah.
Justin Jackson (41:00)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (41:11)
especially businesses are not willing to do that. Most of them are gonna want to just speak to a human for five minutes just to make sure there's a real person there and then they will buy. And I figured that out pretty quickly with audience ops. And then I made a system out of it and then I hired salespeople to do that role so that I didn't have to do it. It's totally manageable but like if you're gonna grow this for a long period of time eventually you're gonna have to have, if you're selling things for multiple thousand dollars you're gonna have to have people at least on the sales side.
Corey Haines (41:14)
Right.
Justin Jackson (41:19)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (41:40)
I I don't even see it as a marketing service. I see it as a AI implementation service. Because I think what what people want is they're like, ⁓ man, I've been wanting to get around to try to figure out how to get Claude to do my SEO for me. This guy's gonna do it for two thousand dollars a month. I might cancel after two, three months and just take the systems with me.
Brian (41:45)
Yeah.
Jordan (41:46)
Yes, it's yes.
Justin Jackson (41:46)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jordan (42:02)
Yes. And no no no it's not a bad thing. The the if when you have a human-powered service, the onboarding and and the first 90 days, there's so much effort and focus being put on that. And that means there's money being spent on it. And so if a person leaves after three or four months, it's a disaster. If they leave under in under a year, you you may even be negative on on on the relationship in general.
Brian (42:02)
That's the thing like, yeah.
Justin Jackson (42:32)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (42:33)
But if it's software and they churn, it's a lot less costly. It's a lot less costly to onboard. It's a lot less costly for a churned customer, and the lifetime value doesn't need to be ⁓ based on you know over a year, 18 months, or something like that. So I So I I just wanna talk about this for a second from the buyer point of view. Because because right, I run a software company, we do
Justin Jackson (42:48)
Yeah, as long as he can get yeah, keep it going.
Jordan (43:00)
Almost nothing for SEO and I feel guilty about it every week. Every week I feel guilty about it. I I I used to spend 12 grand a month on SEO and did it for a year straight and just did not see the right ROI for that kind of spend. So I stopped. And now I'm doing nothing and I feel guilty and all of a sudden I see the service for $1500. I'm like, that's a
Justin Jackson (43:14)
Hm.
Jordan (43:23)
immediate. That's a no-brainer take my card go three, four, five months see and and then measure it. I could be with them for six months and spend less than I spend on one month. If it works at all, I'm like cool.
Justin Jackson (43:28)
Yeah.
Brian (43:33)
It's a fantastic value proposition.
Jordan (43:36)
Yes, yes. I I think the the the key is that it's not directly comparable to an a traditional service. And so the things that we would normally react to around like the concern around churn and the price point and calling on the phone, I I think some of the nature of that stuff changes with
Justin Jackson (43:51)
Mm.
Jordan (43:56)
w what's happening under the hood also. That it's also being purchased like software and canceled like software, but it's not as painful to the underlying service as if it were a human-powered service with a customer success person and an onboarding person and account manager and everything else.
Brian (43:58)
mean, there's...
I look, I'm the first person who really, really wants these done for you services to be sold and bought and operated like products. And that was my whole thing, productized services. But there is a behind the scenes reality of selling really any type of service, but this is included, right? So if you look at SEO, and I've been running some SEO programs similar to what Josh has been doing, but I've been doing it for my own products. And most of it is...
Justin Jackson (44:21)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Brian (44:40)
Most of the legwork is off of my desk and I have agents doing it according to processes that are basically just programmed for them to run. But some of those things involve having those agents write pages like product comparison pages or use case pages and things like that onto the website. Great, those are things that we should have and we should be publishing them. And that's part of what Josh's service does.
But I've only been running it for two weeks on my products and already like three different times I go in and I read the page that AI wrote and I'm like, we gotta angle the positioning a little bit differently. So I have some feedback and I want this revised, right? So I know how to revise that with my bots and I have my systems for doing that internally. But if you're a client,
Justin Jackson (45:20)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (45:26)
of Josh's thing, you're going to be a client who's going to be sending in these, these requests or, or, hey, we just got this new, this new partnership, we got to make sure we get it, we get a blog post about that. And, I've got this other marketing person on my team and they need to get hooked into whatever this external service is doing. And, there's this technical connection issue that the development now we've got to bug the developers to get it hooked up into Josh's thing. Like, there's all these little like messy details that like, it, they can all be dealt with, of course.
But it's not as turnkey as the tweet or as the landing page is gonna make it seem. ⁓
Justin Jackson (46:01)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I I'm still big on this. I think what what was that that that ⁓ joke video you guys were telling me about? ⁓ AI in that town, what was it? It was some
Jordan (46:13)
Some so most boomer comment we we've had in a Charles Neil, yes.
Brian (46:14)
yeah, AI in Charleston. Yeah.
Justin Jackson (46:15)
Charleston AI, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Charleston AI. I mean, I think that could work. I the the the part that I I mean, maybe this will work for Josh, but the the part that I'm thinking about more is I'm going the other way. I'm doing more phone calls. I'm doing more manual outreach. I'm adding more humans to this. And our like our reviews and ratings, everything is going up and to the right. Why? Because there's
way more people now that want to talk to a real human, that want that individualized attention. And if you want it enough as a service provider or a product person and you're looking at the landscape, it's like, what are you willing to do? Are you willing to do a phone call? Are you willing to call to do an onboarding demo for anybody that wants it when people sign up? I think the extra mile stuff is gonna start working a lot better as well.
Jordan (47:12)
I feel like the the the two combined is it can be really powerful. Right? If if I'm Josh, I mean Corey, I don't how many people you have at Conversion Factory, but if I look at something like what Josh is doing and the the underlying work is able to be done by agents, I just look at that and I say, I say, great, I'm gonna hire two people for every for every 10 clients. And we're gonna have we're gonna a beautiful, profitable service service company. Fantastic.
Justin Jackson (47:16)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (47:29)
It's fantastic.
Justin Jackson (47:33)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Brian (47:39)
mean, dude, this really is incredible. I mean, he's literally selling the thing for $2,000. I was selling audience house for $2,000 a month. I had a team of 25 people under that. He's got one. Two, yeah.
Corey Haines (47:41)
Yeah. Yeah.
Justin Jackson (47:49)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (47:50)
Right, he could hire a team of two, three people, take great care people, do calls, answer in a human way, but underneath right, Corey, I when I looked at this, I sent it to my team. Right, we've got like 2,500 small business customers at Rosie. And I'm like, maybe what we should offer to this customer base next isn't another product. Maybe it's a service. And and so for me, I went toward marketing.
Justin Jackson (48:14)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (48:14)
Yeah, right. Right.
Jordan (48:18)
in your universe of of marketing services, have you started to see things like this? I mean SEO obviously is is marketing, but it's kind of its own technical thing.
Corey Haines (48:29)
yeah, no, there's definitely parts of this ⁓ that you can produitize. There's certain spots. I think SEO in particular has a couple things going for it that makes it really easy to productize. Particularly the people have an easy time getting on board with the output. it's four blog posts per month, one per week. And it's just like this very easy, like, okay, here's what I get, here's what I get, here's what I get. When you're selling an outcome, like I'm gonna do advertising for you, people don't care about how many ads
Justin Jackson (48:48)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (48:59)
you make for them. They don't care about how much ⁓ time you're gonna spend in the ad ad manager. They're like, we'll just make a profitable ad. That's all I care about. And so there's like, I don't know, maybe fifty percent of marketing is more output driven where you can productize and sell the output and that's easy to productize. The other fifty percent is more outcome driven and people don't care about the output and so it's harder to productize.
Justin Jackson (49:08)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (49:28)
And that's where I've been trying to figure out like what is the balance. I actually think we're working on a service right now that's really productize, ⁓ actually around AEO. Because there's a lot of these things that are very output-driven that we can offer at a you know lower price point that's very automated and AI driven. But most of what we do still, like, hey, we're gonna make you new brand, we're gonna run ads for you, we're gonna da-da-da. It's like
Justin Jackson (49:39)
Mm, yeah.
Corey Haines (49:58)
can't really I've productized enough that I can in in the sense that there's like very clear and transparent pricing, one task at a time, two tasks at a time, three tasks at a time, so on and so forth. But it's it's it's fifty fifty. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, very human, heavy.
Brian (50:10)
It's still creative work that needs feedback and approval.
Justin Jackson (50:15)
I mean, this is another thing we wanted to chat about is ⁓ we had a question. What's working with SaaS right now in terms of both products and marketing channels? ⁓ do you have some thoughts on that, Corey? Like what's what do you see working right now if it and has it gotten harder?
Corey Haines (50:26)
Mm.
I see ⁓ yeah. I I see a lot of things that aren't working right now. Yeah. Well yeah, right. Sharing revenue numbers is definitely like kind of sketchy now. No, like there there's a few things I noticed. One is ⁓ let's just take Google for example. Like you can most people are looking at Google from the perceptive of organic and SEO and they're like, well
Brian (50:37)
you
Justin Jackson (50:38)
What's not working that used to work?
Jordan (50:38)
Yep. Bragging in public.
Justin Jackson (50:47)
Uh-huh.
Corey Haines (50:59)
Now AI is eating Google and so search traffic is down and is SEO dead? Da-da-da-da. Like I think we all know kind of where that's going. The other interesting part of that is Google Ads. Google Ads have been a phenomenal channel for most SaaS companies because it's search driven. It's, hey, I'm looking for a ⁓ barbershop CRM, and then now you can just place your ad at the top. You don't even have to worry about organically ranking. But what happens when now above your ad
Justin Jackson (51:03)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (51:29)
There's an AI overview that has this whole answer and like one or two links. And then there's like four to eight ads, and then there's the organic search results. We've seen Google Ads get really, really squeezed by the AI overviews. ⁓ the clicks are way, way down. Yeah, I know. I mean, it's just this big shift.
Justin Jackson (51:31)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Hm.
Brian (51:49)
Like that's so interesting from Google's perspective. You could see why they would push ads up to the top, but now when they're putting their AI in front of their own revenue channel for Google, that's weird.
Jordan (51:52)
Right?
Yeah.
Corey Haines (52:00)
And I think they're figuring out how to like basically create an ad product in within the AI overview, right? They're not gonna let that go forever. But we're in this weird middle time of transition where we're all getting caught. I had to turn off Google Ads for some of my own products. That was like the main talk about plateaus, Jordan. Like TrueList plateaued a couple of times because there were these big shifts or there was a pricing thing or there was a whatever. One of was ⁓ Google ads back like
Justin Jackson (52:08)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (52:30)
May, I think is when a lot of people noticed it. The the A AI overviews got ⁓ launched for like most of the the major search terms. All of a sudden the costs are through the roof, the clicks are way, way down. Like it we we literally went from we can acquire a customer for a hundred dollars to now it costs us a thousand dollars and it's just we're not gonna do that.
Justin Jackson (52:51)
Wow.
Brian (52:52)
Can you get into that a little bit? ⁓ Again, going back to your portfolio of especially SaaS tools, I know that you have a lot of these SEO and AEO systems in place and bots and recurring loops, and you are running some ads. How do you think about your investment in paid marketing channels?
Jordan (52:52)
Can't do it.
Brian (53:15)
versus like organic marketing, is it a product by product basis? You think there's an opportunity here, but maybe not over there? Like how do you spread your bets and when in like a startup, like if you're placing all these bets with these different products, when in that life cycle do you start to think like, let me go beyond just the basic SEO and start to experiment with like paid and other stuff?
Corey Haines (53:25)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, to me there's basically an order of operations. Like I'm always gonna start with SEO and now that's basically AEO too. And then I'm gonna move on to Google Ads because it's the same thing, but you're just paying to play instead of trying to do it organically. And then I'm gonna keep working down the list. I think meta ads is having a big resurgence. Their Andromeda algorithm is absolutely incredible for targeting and you basically don't have to do any targeting anymore. You just make good ads and then they serve it to the right people and still at
Justin Jackson (54:07)
Hm.
Corey Haines (54:08)
Pretty good price points as well. there's this whole AEO world, ⁓ all the other things that like when I think about my like my bets, you know, if I'm working on my random open source invoicing tool that I have, invoice command, I'm not gonna go try to spin up LinkedIn ads for it tomorrow. I'm gonna start with SEO. As soon as that's like kind of done, I'm probably gonna move on to Google Ads.
Justin Jackson (54:30)
Mm.
Corey Haines (54:35)
But then if I really can't make that work, like I'm not gonna go that much further down the line. When I think about investing and like when I'm making these bets, like when do I go all in? I'm looking to kind of keep going down the line of these marking channels. Okay, I'm gonna stack this one on, now I'm gonna stack this one on, now I'm gonna stack this one on. And as soon as I hit some resistance of one of these, then that's when I start to get a little bit of pause and being like, okay, how much is it worth it for me to now to keep pushing this boulder up the hill?
Or should I just move on to the next product and like go down that list, right? but I still mainly start with s SEO and AEO. I think Google Ads can still be ⁓ good in a lot of pockets. I I've just seen in general too, like when we talk about what's working in marketing, it's incredibly difficult right now to market software to other software companies. Like that's just a hard game to play. Because that's what everybody's doing. That's what
Justin Jackson (55:08)
Hmm.
Jordan (55:09)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Jackson (55:31)
Hm.
Jordan (55:32)
Yep. Yeah, bad. Bad ICP.
Corey Haines (55:34)
You know, all the early adopters are selling to other early adopters and you're like, Cool, but like what Jordan's doing, what I honestly what all of you guys are doing, I think is a much better strategy. And and why I see this with all of our clients. We have some crazy, crazy niche clients. And it's like almost like a a perfect correlation between the more niche they are, the easier they are to market and the faster they grow.
Justin Jackson (56:00)
Mm.
Brian (56:01)
want to ask you about that. That's actually what I wanted to ask you next was like, okay, we know that like, someone like you Corey, you have your stuff that you promote publicly on Twitter, Josh has has ⁓ has has promoted this this new SEO service off the back of his personal audience. But we also know that you have all these other products that are niche and your clients have these niche products like
Jordan (56:03)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (56:24)
What would you, because there are definitely people listening who are just gonna be like, all right, well, if somebody has a large audience, of course they're gonna be at this marketing advantage, this distribution advantage. But that's not the case. We know that, especially when selling into like niche industry. So how do you think about that from like a startup perspective, especially like a self-funded taking bets? How do you, like, how do you think about getting those first 50, first 100 customers?
Corey Haines (56:33)
Mm.
Brian (56:53)
What's the timeframe on that? What's your investment mindset on that? If you're starting from zero and it's not a product that you can even promote to your personal audience, because they're not your personal audience, how do you think about that kind of thing today in 2026?
Corey Haines (57:03)
Yeah. I mean you gotta get really, really close to the customer, right? So ⁓ this little collection of church apps that I started to build. ⁓ I was playing volleyball with one of my friends at church and then he was like, Hey, do you know someone who could build me an app to do like check ins for our teen center? We have like an inner city, you know, safe place for kids to come if they don't wanna go back to home. And I was like, dude, you're gonna look at spending fifty grand for something that
Then you have to ask them for every time there's a bug or a new feature, dah dah da, it's gonna really expensive. I was like, but I just learned how to code. I could give this a shot and and you just pay me like a little monthly subscription, basically. Instead, he was like, that's way better. And and then there's been a little bit of word of mouth, right? But like he texts me when he has a feature request or when there's a bug report. And like I'm asking him, I'm ⁓ we'll FaceTime and he'll he'll FaceTime and like share his
Justin Jackson (57:56)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (58:02)
computer screen from his phone and be like, okay, so I was doing this and like and then you know, there's like
Justin Jackson (58:04)
Yeah.
Brian (58:08)
So I love that because it's your friend, right? Everyone who goes to a niche industry, they've got a brother-in-law, they've got a friend, they've got a group that they're in. Okay, that's awesome because that's where you uncover the idea that you would never have otherwise encountered. That's gold. So you get that first customer, maybe you get five from some word of mouth from some friends. What's step two? How do you go from that to your first 50?
Justin Jackson (58:19)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (58:37)
Yeah.
Brian (58:37)
And or is it like, okay, that's just a seed that I'm going to water for the next six to 12 months while I while I work on other stuff. Like, how do think about that?
Corey Haines (58:45)
Well, I mean then I think it's about getting to know your customer from the product perspective, but then about like the buyer psychology. So then I'm doing all of the secret shopping jobs to be done types of interrogation tech techniques of, you know, okay, so when you were thinking about looking for software like this, like what did you do first? Did you search on TikTok? Did you go to Google? What did you do? you found this other software and you tried to make that work. Why didn't it work for you?
Interesting, where'd that lead you to from there? So I'm trying to just put myself in their shoes of how they would go and search or not just search, but how they would go find and discover software like mine to reverse engineer what are probably the marketing channels. There there's a lot of things too about like just the vocabulary, right? How am I supposed to well this is another thing AI has made really easy, but one bottleneck for SEO, for example, was
Justin Jackson (59:30)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (59:41)
If I don't know the vocabulary that my customer uses to describe their worlds, their products, their industry, their job, then I can't go find the keywords that they're searching for because I don't know what they mean. I don't even know if they're relevant or not. With AI though, I can be like, hey, I'm doing keyword research for church administrative pastors. What are the what's their vocabulary? What are the terms that they use day to day? How do they go and search for software? What are their budgets like normally?
Justin Jackson (59:55)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (1:00:11)
Now I take all that with a grain of salt, but it definitely gives me a huge leg up on a lot of that initial discovery of okay, I think this is probably gonna be a viable marking channel over here. This is not gonna be a viable marking channel over here. It seems like most people discover it this way, not that way. Cool, I'm gonna do that and not that over there.
Justin Jackson (1:00:29)
Mm-hmm. My w one of my favorite things to do now is I send this welcome email to everyone who signs up for transistor. What's going on in your world that brought you here today? And then they'll usually say, I found you via and if they don't say it, I'll I'll follow up. I'll say, Curious, how did you find us? It's helpful. Google search, ChatGPT, recommendation from a friend. Then they'll say, Well, ChatGBT, I'll say, Could you take a screenshot of that or share that link with me? And now
Corey Haines (1:00:57)
Mm. Yeah.
Justin Jackson (1:00:59)
I've got their actual language. And it is fascinating. It's like, ChatGPT, based on what you know about me and my, even it could be like, based on what you know me about me and my ethics and morals, which podcast hosting platform should I choose? Based on what you know about me and the kinds of software I like to buy, what podcast hosting platform should I choose? This is now in a whole other world of personalization, but you can still learn all of the lessons from looking at these chat.
Jordan (1:00:59)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Jackson (1:01:29)
transcripts or the screenshots and seeing what people actually use. I I even noticed ⁓ I I use SEO testing and I noticed that there's like ⁓ people's personal like searches are kind of leaking into these ⁓ SEO ⁓ testing emails like for top keywords. I'll see if I can find one. But it's like
Corey Haines (1:01:48)
Mm.
Justin Jackson (1:01:58)
⁓ no yeah, here, right here I think. ⁓ not quite. I'll f I'll find it. But it's interesting to see what people are actually how people are finding things now. And now you actually can get that information, right? Like it's there.
Corey Haines (1:02:13)
Yeah. Yeah, now you can.
Brian (1:02:15)
There's this really interesting trend with everything. Did you guys see the news about Amazon, how they just recently, I think they're blocking Muse agents, and maybe all other agents ⁓ for all traffic on Amazon? obviously, Amazon is the storefront for so many buyers. And then Shopify is just like, come on in. Bring your agents. Let them buy. ⁓
Justin Jackson (1:02:28)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Corey Haines (1:02:29)
Well.
Jordan (1:02:31)
Yeah, yeah.
Corey Haines (1:02:41)
Mm.
Justin Jackson (1:02:43)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (1:02:43)
Yep.
Brian (1:02:44)
That is a really interesting trend, obviously, in e-commerce, but I think that's going to be everywhere else, where it's like, how much is the human going to be? How relevant is a website anymore and the human decision? And maybe it's so much more about the bot making the buying decision on behalf of the human.
Corey Haines (1:02:49)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of which there's this whole AEO thing, which like that's definitely one of the things that's working. ⁓ a really quick little case study, we have a client who is in this super, super niche space. Like they make software for like a very old school ⁓ trade. and I can't say you who it is because it's like it is so niche that you would just do a Google search and you just find But but they're with we've been doing their SEO for them, we've been doing some ads for them, we do
Justin Jackson (1:03:04)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jordan (1:03:26)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (1:03:32)
Did their website, we did a bunch of other things, things are going great, they keep going up and to the right. And then I was like, hey, what have you guys been doing for AI visibility and A AEO? And they were like, nothing. Like we were waiting for you guys. And we're like, shoot, okay, we should done that earlier. So we just finished like a three-month experiment. And we track it all in Magister, because I like built like an AI visibility tool in there just because I wasn't happy with the other ones out there. And they're basically their AI visibility score.
Justin Jackson (1:03:44)
Mm.
Corey Haines (1:03:59)
doubled. It went from fourteen percent to twenty eight percent in three months. And how all this gets measured and calculated is like still like i it that's a new vocabulary for us to like, is this impressive? Is it not? Like what matters? but the thing was that their traffic doubled in three months and their booked calls tripled in three months. It it so what I try to tell people too is AEO is like there's this dam
Justin Jackson (1:04:11)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (1:04:29)
of demand that's been like piling up in this lake of people searching in Chat GPT, Claude, so on and so forth. And when you can just do some really basic good AEO, you unleash that dam. And then all of a sudden you're just like turning on this channel for you. Now it's not gonna be like that for everybody.
Justin Jackson (1:04:36)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (1:04:45)
There are some like quick hit like basics that like if you just a few like just do these like low hanging fruit like on your website.
Corey Haines (1:04:54)
Yeah. Okay, so I just talked about this on on my podcast that I do with my guys at Conversion Factory, where I said that good AEO is first of all good SEO. So just check that box, buy Josh a service, hire conversion factory. I don't know. I don't care. Just do that well. Number two, good AEO is actually good product marketing. Having good positioning, lots of good web pages on your site. I think a lot of people are getting the idea that your website doesn't matter anymore, but there's a lot of studies that have come out more recently where they found that if the
Justin Jackson (1:05:06)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (1:05:24)
AI is just the LM is just relying on third party citations. That moved the needle about 20 to 30% on the recommendation for your product. But if it had a third-party citation and a page on your website that it could use, then that went up to like 90%. And so it's kind of two sides of the same coin. Like AI, if you think about it, the LLM wants to go search for something about you from your website as like the primary source.
And then it wants to verify it on a third-party source. So you need both of those. ⁓ so good product marketing is number two. Number three is ⁓ good SEO or sorry, good AEO is good brand. I say that because it's like, okay, how many organic web mentions can you get? That's what it comes down to. How do you get web mentions? Now we're going back to old school tactics of like PR blasts. ⁓ we're going to things like
Justin Jackson (1:05:57)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (1:06:22)
backlinks, which is not super old school, but it's still relevant. But now people are kind of like, okay, well a backlink is a backlink. I don't have to just go after the big backlinks, I can get any old backlink. it's publishing on YouTube, on LinkedIn, like having web presence.
Brian (1:06:35)
Is that so with with like building
Justin Jackson (1:06:40)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Lars Lofgren talls calls that your footprint on the web. Like you need to have you can't just have a footprint in one place because now part of your relevancy and your trustworthiness is scored on is this a real entity that we can see has customers, has reviews, has multiple footprints across the web, as opposed to just one website or just one Twitter account. Like that's
Brian (1:06:41)
with building links. Yeah.
Corey Haines (1:06:45)
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Justin Jackson (1:07:09)
Too easy to fake now.
Brian (1:07:11)
Like I wonder it is it are we hearing that it's like the same game as it as it's always been like build links have have strong on-page SEO but then build build high quality links but maybe it's less about like getting those like high authority links and more about just like spread spread the mentions spread the spread the the links
Corey Haines (1:07:32)
It it's more that. Yeah. SEO has turned into like you basically only want high quality links. whereas AEO is where SEO was ten to fifteen years ago. That's gonna change again in the future. So like I'll take all this with a grain of salt. Or if you're listening to this back like two years from now, then don't listen to anything I say. But i yeah, y you this goes back to something I said earlier, which is you wanna do whatever you can. Like I'm gonna take
Jordan (1:07:49)
Yeah.
Justin Jackson (1:07:51)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (1:07:59)
anything and everything that you give me from a marketing perspective because that's what counts.
Justin Jackson (1:08:04)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I I think it's way I mean, this goes back to Rubin's tweet, ⁓ where he says, you know, most people are approaching AI marketing in the wrong way. They're they're like over relying on automation and skipping the manual grindy work that makes it makes it effective. And they don't know their customers and buying process enough. To me, this is like so much of the game is just I'm gonna go out and do the manual grindy work every day that could be
Super uncomfortable, like messaging a customer and saying, Hey, I know this is weird, but here's a Reddit thread. I know you've left us a review on Trustpilot, but I'm wondering if you could re leave us a similar review on this Reddit thread because that's where people are seeing reviews. We're small company, we're five people, like ⁓ can you do me a solid here? And that sucks to do that work. It's not fun. ⁓ but it's what is getting the results right now with AEO.
Corey Haines (1:09:06)
I concur.
Justin Jackson (1:09:06)
⁓ Jordan, maybe I don't know if you guys want to end on this, but I've I've been thinking about that last section of last week's episode a ton. Well, what came out of it was because you're thinking about investing in other companies and stuff, but w the thing I keep thinking about is if I got fired as CEO, what would someone else come in and do tomorrow that would help us grow? I've been thinking about that a ton.
Jordan (1:09:17)
Which one?
Justin Jackson (1:09:35)
And I wonder if we could pick up on that a little bit too. Like what Corey, Brian, whoever Jordan, what do you think are the things actually Jordan, you haven't talked in a while. What do you think are the things people are missing? Like as you're looking at other companies, I'm you you talked about meta ads, maybe you could talk about that too. But what what are other people missing that if if you bought their companies, what would you be doing that would, you know, that they're not seeing or that they're too precious about?
Jordan (1:10:04)
I think the nature of this is that everyone brings in their own experiences, biases, failures, successes. And and it's really useful for the individual. Let's say, for example, if I was looking at a company to acquire, right now, my bias is I want a company that I think I can advertise for. And let
Justin Jackson (1:10:10)
Mm.
Jordan (1:10:28)
the meta algorithm go out and find customers and basically use my advantage of having capital to spend to grow a lot faster. And so because I know that that's my bias, I think what we all do naturally when we when we do Zoom calls with friends, is we're kinda asking to borrow their biases. What do you got going on? What's working for you? And and and then it goes through this filter of, okay, well w would that work for me? Because
Justin Jackson (1:10:36)
Yeah.
Mm, yeah. Yeah.
Jordan (1:10:58)
Maybe I should try that, right? Because all of us filter through this like self-interest filter. So as we're talking right now and Corey's talking about AEO, you know in the back of my mind, I'm like, huh, well, I wonder what we should be doing about AEO. So so I think it's just good to have conversations with other people because it's very unlikely that the exact same thing's happening in their company as is happening in yours. So there's if even if there's nothing to learn and it's not gonna work for you, it's just new ideas. So what
Justin Jackson (1:11:04)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Do you think Corey should be like we talked about Google ads? ⁓ Corey or Jordan, do you think that maybe meta ads are gonna replace that that you have your stack, right? SEO, AEO. Then you went to Google AdWords, but are are you gonna do you think that still deserves a spot as number three for most SaaS companies? You think it's still worth doing?
Jordan (1:11:50)
I just have a experimental budget that I keep in mind. And I have our main channels are Meta and Google. And it's really meta. Google is there to capture the demand created by meta ads that then go off and search on Google. And so we spend like 10 grand a month on brand ads, which is annoying and also extremely effective. So that that's just fine. Now we we we tried to go
Justin Jackson (1:12:03)
Mm.
Brian (1:12:03)
Yeah, like the intent.
Justin Jackson (1:12:12)
Hm.
Jordan (1:12:17)
To the next advertising platform. Well, we haven't really messed with LinkedIn because I've had bad experiences, it's very expensive, difficult to me. ⁓ our ICP isn't quite there, whatever else. But there are other channels out there. So right now, I actually went back to cold email. So I spend three, four grand a month on cold email because I don't know, mm it didn't work 18 months ago. It doesn't mean it's not gonna work now. And what
Justin Jackson (1:12:26)
Hmm.
How much you spending like ballpark? How much are you spending every month on marketing campaigns?
Jordan (1:12:45)
About eighty K.
Yeah. Well, you have to compare that with how much we're growing, which I won't tell you. But but the ratio is good. And and that's that's actually the only thing that matters. Can you spend enough, grow quickly enough to get to profitability so that you have an infinite marketing budget eff effectively? Because you can spend eighty grand but your bank balance will go up. And it's just a race a race to get there.
Justin Jackson (1:12:54)
Yeah.
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (1:13:12)
Well do you know your payback period right now? Like what would you say your your time to profitability is? Okay, yeah, so you're yeah, you're in in the golden range. Right? Hell yeah.
Jordan (1:13:17)
It's b between three between three to four months.
Is yeah, hit the gas, baby. Yep, yep, that's right. So
Justin Jackson (1:13:27)
Pay payback period is just I invest a hundred bucks and it takes me three months to get a hundred bucks back from the customer.
Jordan (1:13:33)
Yeah, or like you you you spend three hundred dollars on average to acquire a paying customer and their average revenue per user is a hundred bucks, therefore in three months you get you get paid back. Like that. and I always look at everything blended because I don't wanna be overly, you know, ⁓ analytical about tracking because you can't be. There is no precision in tracking anymore. So it's just kinda like, well, we spent all this, we got all this, d w divide one by the other. That's about how much we spend per customer.
Justin Jackson (1:13:42)
Got it.
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (1:14:02)
But on the other channels, there's always something else. So today I have a call, well earlier in the week I had a call, and the next week I have a second call with an affiliate agency.
Justin Jackson (1:14:12)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (1:14:12)
So I'm basically just setting up the next experiment, and that's like twenty five hundred bucks a month. And that's just like I should just keep trying. And if cold email doesn't work, I just drop it after three months. But the potential of finding another channel to spend money efficiently in is is so worth it. And feels like a ⁓ a smart, safe thing to do to try to diversify. I I'm resigned to the fact that
Justin Jackson (1:14:30)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (1:14:40)
you know, I I I have to pray to the Lord Zuckerberg, but I would love to experiment with, you know, some diversification. Yeah, so w y
Justin Jackson (1:14:48)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (1:14:50)
And most of your experiment budgets and most of these programs, you're going out looking for agencies or consultants to run that. Correct me if I'm wrong, most of it is not being run by your team in-house. It's just easier, faster to experiment with it external.
Jordan (1:15:02)
Yeah.
No, no. We we our team is built to handle the demand that comes in. Not not to create it.
That's kind of where we have found ourselves and our strength and everything else. And maybe it makes sense to invest later on in having someone specialize in that generation. But right now, all this leverage for us is like the advertising agency. We've we've selectively taken pieces in-house. Our agency is great at UGC and video, and we did these street talk interview things that are working well, and they're great at media buying. They're just not good at static ads. And
Corey Haines (1:15:16)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Jackson (1:15:38)
Mm.
Corey Haines (1:15:43)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (1:15:43)
Th the AI tools these days are great at static ads, and so we just kinda yank that in house, saved ourselves three thousand bucks a month, and now we we control that piece because it's effective. It it's efficient. It's once every two weeks we sit down and go, All right, what should experiment with? What's working, what's not working? Let's crank, you know, ten, twelve or twenty ads out and then hand it over to the media buyer. So similar to Okay.
Justin Jackson (1:16:03)
Hmm.
Corey Haines (1:16:03)
H have you guys seen sorry, I was gonna say with Jason Cohen's elephant, what's it called? Elephant curve, ⁓ growth curves, S curves. It's this whole idea of like you get a marketing channel to work and it starts to go up, and eventually you start to get the point of diminishing returns. But it instead of just like throwing your hands up and be like, Okay, well, that's the end of marketing then I guess we just stop there, you layer on these these S curves.
Justin Jackson (1:16:11)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (1:16:34)
And that's what keeps getting you to the next milestone.
Jordan (1:16:38)
See, Jace, I'm not smart enough like Jason to understand what I'm doing. I just I just know what makes sense to do next. Yes, yes. And he he has a great way of kind of analyzing, no, well this is actually what's happening, is you're trying to build an S curve on top of an S curve because you've reached, you know, more or less what Meta can do for us for the time being. I in truth, those street talk interviews is an attempt to break the flattening of the S curve in the meta channel because it opens up new audiences at the top.
Justin Jackson (1:16:38)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (1:16:42)
It's intuition. It's intuition.
Justin Jackson (1:16:58)
Yeah.
Jordan (1:17:08)
Yes.
Justin Jackson (1:17:08)
Brian, I wonder what you think about this idea, 'cause you know, you've had one channel for builder methods, which is YouTube. I do you think there's opportunity to layer some more stuff on top? Or how are you thinking about that?
Brian (1:17:20)
mean, definitely, always. ⁓ I'm just in a much different situation and mindset and phase than I think all of you. ⁓ I'm just so much more back down to ground zero and thinking about product selection. And this actually gets back to something we were talking about earlier on in this episode. We sort of brushed past it.
Justin Jackson (1:17:22)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Brian (1:17:50)
⁓ which, which is like the bets, the bets thing. And I don't want to get back into that debate of like focus versus not, but what I do want to touch on is I think they're like, part of it is like my years of, of doing this that have started to push the pendulum in, a direction that, that, that like sort of overcorrected. And what I, what I mean by that is like, I, a couple of years ago, it was
Justin Jackson (1:17:55)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brian (1:18:19)
It was so much more about like, I'm going to do any product, if I'm going to choose to do any product, I've got a good idea or I observe something in the market or I want to scratch my own itch. I think there's a product there. I better decide right. I better do the extra rounds of market research, go to market strategy. Like, yeah, I know I can build any product. I know that. ⁓ And I've known that for many years, even way before AI. But
Justin Jackson (1:18:25)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brian (1:18:48)
I've been through that cycle enough times where I'm just like, if I'm going to even do anything, I better know that I have a go to market strategy and some vision for like how this thing can actually sustain for a year or longer. Otherwise, it's just not worth doing, right? ⁓ But I do think that
Justin Jackson (1:18:53)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Brian (1:19:08)
there's an overcorrection there now in 2026, at least just for me personally, where I'm over analyzing every idea. I, you know, obviously I look at what what Josh put up and I'm like, I know how to do productized services, I could do something like that. I don't know, not not exactly that, of course, but like something ⁓ I've, I've been looking at new product ideas to build, I have a couple that I'm starting to noodle on right now. Really just
Justin Jackson (1:19:16)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (1:19:37)
When I say a couple, mean, I'm trying to choose between which one of these do I want to start to build? I'm not going to do them all at the same time. But I am in this like analysis paralysis. That's where I find myself right now where I'm like, I literally have like, I would say two definite ideas, maybe a third, where it's like these, these are products I can absolutely start building this weekend, I could probably ship them within a week. But I've been looking at those products for two months.
Justin Jackson (1:19:44)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Brian (1:20:07)
analyzing and reanalyzing and thinking like, is there a market here? Like, or should I be looking at some other product? And so it's that like opportunity cost and over analysis where I'm just like, fuck it, I should just fucking build it. And then and then learn once I have the product in hand, because now now we have that ability. That's what's different today. From two, three, five years ago.
Justin Jackson (1:20:17)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Brian (1:20:32)
Because today, the MVP, the experiment, the bet for someone like me and many of us, Corey included everyone, like, the bet is like, OK, I know there's a product category here. I know there's a problem to solve here. Maybe it's a scratch my own itch. Maybe I know a market of people. I could build this thing, and then I can see how much legs it has, and then we learn from there.
Justin Jackson (1:20:41)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (1:21:00)
and it passes experiment two, experiment three, then we keep going. If not, then maybe I pivoted or maybe I just go on to the next idea. All of that is possible. That's where I'm finding myself today. That's really what I spend most of my time thinking about right now is what is the product mix? With builder methods, ⁓ it's come to a weird place, to be honest. It had a pretty huge first year and now...
Justin Jackson (1:21:13)
Yeah.
Brian (1:21:30)
Now it's like continuing, like we have a really strong customer base, but the demand has changed a lot. Like even through YouTube, even when I have high views from YouTube, like they don't really come and convert the way that they used to because the buying mindset has changed, the educational market has changed a lot just in the last six months, especially in AI. AI is so fast to change. And then there's...
Justin Jackson (1:21:49)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (1:21:59)
Just to like then there's a lot that I do a lot of personal exploration around like, what am I trying to do here? What kind of business, what kind of work am I trying to commit myself to get into? Right? Like, so again, like can look at a service like what Pigford launched and I'm like, okay, that's great. Like he hit something there and maybe there's some version of that that I could do. I have the skills and the experience to do it. Is that what I want to be doing?
Justin Jackson (1:22:12)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brian (1:22:28)
Because really where I find the most energy, the most gratification from what I do is quiet time in my studio crafting really interesting products that solve solid problems. And I like to do that ⁓ on a couple different products. I love doing customer support for like customers who use Flyrite, my little writing Mac app tool. I love doing customer support for that kind of stuff. That's a tool that I care a lot about.
Justin Jackson (1:22:44)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (1:22:59)
Mimeo, I've got a couple of new customers on there. I like that kind of stuff. It's an open question on how much opportunity there is left out there and what the playbook for me to go scout out potential product ideas that fit that mold. ⁓ But again, it's analysis paralysis right now. That's where I'm at.
Justin Jackson (1:23:04)
Mm.
Yeah.
This is yeah, this is a tension I want us to expl continue to explore in the show is this idea of like the I d like 'cause I I think you're right. Like in the old days you could think about what pitches you wanted to hit and you know, be really careful about what am I gonna swing at. And now it's almost like, yes, but now you can get like as many pitches as you want. And so that's changed. But also you could hit a home run and it could disintegrate.
Brian (1:23:46)
Yeah.
Justin Jackson (1:23:49)
before it hits the stands. And and so now
Jordan (1:23:51)
That's a good way to put it.
Brian (1:23:52)
Like I think the thing I think the thing I think the I think the mindset that I have right now where we sit this month is that like, it's what I need most is not ⁓ a new winning marketing channel. It's actually a new product, if I'm honest. ⁓ Because like, what I've been working on are these like growth ⁓ loops so that the products that I do have, at least are doing the basics.
Justin Jackson (1:24:06)
Mm.
Brian (1:24:19)
the SEO, the AEO, those mechanics that like, I think every product should just be doing those baseline, right? ⁓ So now I have the systems in place that whatever product I do, including the ones that I already have and including the ones, the future ones, now I have a system with bots that I can just plug in and they're gonna be doing the basics, the low hanging fruit, at least getting that stuff right on a recurring basis. ⁓
But my businesses are not in a place where it's like, all right, we've hit this pretty high level of revenue and now we just got to step on the gas and find a new marketing channel for them. Like, no, really what I need is like a new vehicle to see what I can grow. And that's what I'm looking around for right now. I've got a couple ideas that I'm noodling on.
Justin Jackson (1:24:54)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Well, this is good guys. I got I got a lunch coming up, so I got a I got a jet. But ⁓ Corey, super great having you on the show, man. ⁓ I'd love to I think you should come back and especially this last thing Brian brought up. I it'd be interesting to get even more granular about like, you know, which of your projects are just killing it, which you know, what happens th two, three months down the road. So yeah, we'd love to have you come back.
Jordan (1:25:28)
Yeah, I wanna hear about the process of a new product. You know, if if if right, if Josh is like an irrepressible artist, like it's just new thing has to come out, you know, awesome. ⁓ so it you know, wha what what is that process? Is it just being paying attention to all of your own pain? That can be good, but can be lead you in the wrong directions. Yeah, so I I I think that's good for everybody because there's a lot of pessimism right now.
Justin Jackson (1:25:32)
Mm.
Brian (1:25:32)
Yeah, that's what I'm most interested in, yeah.
You
Justin Jackson (1:25:39)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (1:25:49)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (1:25:57)
about product decisions and what to build and there's nothing feels like it's gonna last and everything feels risky, but that's not that's like that's not right. It
Justin Jackson (1:25:59)
Mm.
Brian (1:26:07)
Yeah, actually. And I know we got to cut it soon. And Justin, you got to hop, that's cool. on that note, that's one of the things that I'm starting to key into is I think I'm way too internally focused right now. ⁓ How can I figure out how to gain exposure to new niches to discover new product potential? ⁓ Because as we know and the theme going around,
Justin Jackson (1:26:13)
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Brian (1:26:37)
versus if you're just going to sell to other developers or other product builders, that's a tough, that's a tough, tough road. like, but that's who I identify with. So those are the personal pains that I'm going to gravitate toward first. Same thing with creators. Like I'm noodling on a thing around video creation and it's like, all right, but like how many, how many of these people would pay for this and how much of it is going to get eaten up by AI and all that. like, but that's, that's the big challenge for someone like me is like, if I'm
Justin Jackson (1:26:41)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brian (1:27:07)
if I'm not active in some other niche or some other world, how do I gain access to those ideas?
Justin Jackson (1:27:13)
Corey, do you have any final thoughts, ⁓ maybe f for Brian or anyone else before you go? Like what what what does that make you think of?
Corey Haines (1:27:24)
Yeah, th there's definitely a a tension between that internal and external inspiration for products and it's obviously way harder to get that external inspiration, but that's kinda probably well let's put it this way. ⁓ who was it? I think it was Aaron Francis the other day. You know, he's got this whole thing about like do hard things, like try the hardest thing possible. Try hard.
Justin Jackson (1:27:35)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brian (1:27:50)
that's, what's his name? ⁓ Jesse Hanley, yeah.
Jordan (1:27:51)
Jesse.
Justin Jackson (1:27:52)
Jesse Hanley.
Corey Haines (1:27:54)
And Jesse Hanley, yeah, they were just talking about it. And that's definitely how I'm thinking about products now, especially. Like, gosh, the harder it is, the better. Because that means that it's just gonna higher barrier of entry for other people. And it's definitely harder, I think, to go after this external source of inspiration for products where it's people that have jobs and industries that you have no idea even existed before you met them. That's harder, and so that's probably better.
Justin Jackson (1:28:04)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (1:28:23)
And I my thing now is I'm always just defaulting to like, okay, what is the harder thing? Even if it's a marketing channel. What's harder for other people to do, to execute on, what are marketing channels they didn't even know exist? I'm gonna really double down on those because I wanna be ahead.
Justin Jackson (1:28:39)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan (1:28:40)
He's he's speaking your love language, Justin. Great place to end it off.
Justin Jackson (1:28:42)
Yep, well said. That's the that's the place to end it. We're gonna have Cory on every damn week now.
Brian (1:28:44)
⁓ For sure.
Jordan (1:28:47)
I want the easy way, but I think you're right. Corey, thanks for coming on, man. Thank you. It was great.
Brian (1:28:48)
This is a good one.
Corey Haines (1:28:49)
Ha ha.
Justin Jackson (1:28:51)
Yeah
Corey Haines (1:28:52)
Yeah. Yeah.
Brian (1:28:52)
Yeah, thanks for hopping on Cory.
Justin Jackson (1:28:55)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (1:28:55)
Thank you guys. Super fun. Appreciate it.
Justin Jackson (1:28:58)
Okay. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next week.
Brian (1:29:00)
Later, folks.
Justin Jackson (1:29:01)
All right.